And if I were a naughty little boy, the idea is to spank me into good behavior?
Lust is to the other passions what the nervous fluid is to life; it supports them all, lends strength to them all ambition, cruelty, avarice, revenge, are all founded on lust.
So long as the laws remain such as they are today, employ some discretion: loud opinion forces us to do so; but in privacy and silence let us compensate ourselves for that cruel chastity we are obliged to display in public.
Sex is as important as eating or drinking and we ought to allow the one appetite to be satisfied with as little restraint or false modesty as the other.
Lust’s passion will be served; it demands, it militates, it tyrannizes.
No kind of sensation is keener and more active than that of pain its impressions are unmistakable.
The man who alters his way of thinking to suit others is a fool.
The pleasure of the senses is always regulated in accordance with the imagination. Man can aspire to felicity only by serving all the whims of his imagination.
One must do violence to the object of one’s desire; when it surrenders, the pleasure is greater.
Don’t have children: they deform women’s bodies and turn into an enemy 20 years later.
Were he supreme, were he mighty, were he just, were he good, this God you tell me about, would it be through enigmas and buffooneries he would wish to teach me to serve and know him?
I don’t know what the heart is, not I: I only use the word to denote the mind’s frailties.
How delicious to corrupt, to stifle all semblances of virtue and religion in that young heart!
Either kill me or take me as I am, because I’ll be damned if I ever change.
There is no God, Nature sufficeth unto herself; in no wise hath she need of an author.
The idea of God is the sole wrong for which I cannot forgive mankind.
What we are doing here is only the image of what we would like to do.
Now I beg of you to tell me whether I must love a human being simply because he exists or resembles me and whether for those reasons alone I must suddenly prefer him to myself?
Destruction, hence, like creation, is one of Nature’s mandates.
She had already allowed her delectable lover to pluck that flower which, so different from the rose to which it is nevertheless sometimes compared, has not the same faculty of being reborn each spring.